We'd referred to it as The Avenue,
Not because it had any pretense of being
Some major thoroughfare
(Indeed it ran for no more than a half-dozen blocks
From the traffic circle at the school building,
Itself de-commissioned for some years now,
To the small bluff at the end of the village
Where buildings ended and trees and fields began,
The view, in our childlike perspective,
What we assumed belonged to the birds and angels)
But because every other roadway
Had been christened with the more plebian "street",
And as the longest and straightest pavement
It was the venue for racing bicycles, skateboards
And anything else with wheels,
(As we later discovered, much to our parents' chagrin)
And certainly we had sent any number of bugs and beetles
To their makers in our mad rush
To reach the road's crest,
And on one horrific occasion, a tiny bird,
Barely past the point of being nurtured in the nest,
Somehow became enmeshed in my spokes
To be flung unceremoniously to the roadside,
It's wings splayed out in a manner
At once almost seraphim-like, yet clearly signaling
That the hatchling in question
(Its species not fully apparent--a pigeon, perhaps,
Or a mourning dove not destined to be part of a pair)
Would never take flight.
I'd looked at it, stunned beyond word or action,
When Nicky Gesters pulled up next to me,
Whispering into my left ear, Nothing to be done, kid.
Happens all the time.  If it wasn't you, woulda been some cat.
And, bereft of any rationale of my own,
I simply nodded, riding back down the *****
Not to return to the high end of the road for some days,
And when the time comes where some errant wheel,
Something rapacious and feline, or some other tool
Of life's winds and wuthering take me to my rest,
I hope to retain sufficient grace to seek out that bird
To proffer my regrets for my all too extant humanity,
My sad and insufficient pentinence.

They arrive by the sackload from the main office on the Via del Pontiere,
Pouring from the bags as if a torrential weeping,
Envelopes a collage of shapes, a multiplicity of pastel hues,
Some addressed with all the formality of a judicial summons,
Others bearing no more than the name of the distaff half
Of the city’s most famous equation.
They tread upon paths long since worn flat
By any number of their predecessors:
Tales of love unrequited, passion misspent,
Promises untruthful and unmet.
These epistles and their authors
Seek solace of varying degree and efficacy:
Some seek kernels of actual guidance or blessing,
As if some ancient and inscrutable advice columnist
Had taken up residence in the Basilica di San Zeno,
Others looking to self-heal through the catharsis of the act of writing,
Most content to quietly assert to the universe itself
I am here, I am here, I am here.

Where, then, is the corresponding mountain of missives
For the son of the House of Montague?
Surely, his shade would be as kindred a soul
To those which affairs of the heart have left so disheartened,
(Indeed, more so, he most assuredly
The schemer and dreamer of the dramatis personae in question.)
For him, though, no rambling, rumbling truck
Emblazoned with the lemon-cheerful Posteitaliane markings
Arrives at an office chock-a-block with secretaries
Whose mission is to answer and archive its all-but-holy contents;
More likely, there is some humble cart,
(The wheel bearings frozen up, the canvas mildewed and frayed)
Containing a handful of birthday cards
Intended for some Renzo or Romano
Miswritten by some absentminded grandmother or great-aunt,
The odd solicitation or final-notice
Which shall go no further for all of eternity.
Despite the hectoring tone of the envelope
Stating that the material is critically time-sensitive
And intended for the eyes of the addressee only.

He’d been close to the big time,
If not a god of the fight game, perhaps a demigod;
He’d been possessed of considerable brute strength
And the ability to shut out concern for the well-being of others,
But there had been the odd ***** in his armor:
An overhand right which announced itself too early,
And arrived just a smidgen too late,
Plus an unhappy tendency to lose focus,
To stray from those plans his corner had set up chapter and verse,
Choosing the forbidden fruit of the quick knockout.

He had, after losing a bout to a top-ranked fighter
(He was eighth in the world, he would chuckle ruefully,
And I fought him like I was eight years old.)
Decided to chuck it all in,
Enrolling in a scruffy little bible college
Sitting just off an interstate on-ramp,
Cheek-to-jowl with a Wendy’s and 7-11,
In order to facilitate the transition from mayhem to ministry.
He’d soured on the process in fairly short order;
He understood instinctually that he, like all men,
Was a sinner, and likely unworthy of salvation,
And the faculty accentuated the notion daily, if not hourly,
Like so many jabs to the midsection.
He’d inquired, gently, as to the approach one should take
To addressing the worrisome paradox
That all men were imperfect beings
Marooned on an imperfect world,
Yet their fallibility was all they had to build on,
(A rickety ladder to scramble upwards, for sure,
But the only way to reach that golden fruit
Held out for him, though just beyond his grasp.)
The responses varied, from sputtering and vague parries
To the suggestion that such notions were heresy,
And so he’d returned to the club-and-casino circuit
Makin’ the best use of the gifts I have, he would sigh,
Before heading out once more,
Hoping there was one more short right at least one more time.

They do not, like their more esteemed Californian cousins,
Sweep into town over sloop-festooned, canvas-checkered waters,
Passing over the remnants of missions
Packed with the ghosts of Christian guilt and romantic swashbucklers;
They labor at their workaday altitude just above the treetops
Still budding in the newness of May,
Pausing to rest on the jagged orange chain-link
Which surrounds the dormant mills,
Or perhaps a sill fronting a boarded window at the old school
Before taking to their summer quarters at the abandoned quarry
A couple of miles up the Klondike Road,
and invariably one of the old-timers will say
Little birds hain't much too look at,
But at least they come back every year,
And then not giving the simple brown creatures another thought,
As they find no particular interest in the notion of flight.

The first leg of our troika was removed easily enough;

Courage is a mercurial thing, waxing and waning

As frequently as the tides--or, perhaps more accurately,

It is like the doomed cell hosting a virus,

Left a barren husk of its former self once the germ

Has gone about its business and moved on.

In any case, he has happily cast off the burden of leadership

So often and unwisely fixed upon our martial heroes,

Content to appear at parades and other events of state,

Answering the roar of the mob in an almost authentic manner

(Though just barely perceptibly less so each year),

Living testament to the notion

That it is easier to be lionized than to live as the lion.




I had convinced myself that a two-headed regime

Would be perfectly workable,

That I could be the yin to the yang

Of my erstwhile alloy colleague

(The intoxicant of power

So dulling my senses that I could believe such nonsense),

The contemplative man of thought acting as a counterweight

To the fiery man of action, the man of the blade.

I had somehow presupposed

(Such was the vastness of my delusion)

That my old brother-in-arms would defer

To the appeal of painstaking analysis and meticulous planning;

It was if I had forgotten that, provided with the genie-like largesse

Of the acquisition of anything he desired, he’d asked for a heart,

As if there wasn’t enough sturm und drang taking place

In that miniature steam boiler of a chest!

While I had buried myself in charts and task-force reports,

He had enmeshed himself in consolidating power.

When his yeomen, huge-hatted and well-armed

Came to my suite of offices to place me under arrest,

I was, at my core, not particularly surprised.




To parrot the line of so many of those who have shared a fate

Much worse than my own,

I am well treated by my caretakers-***-captors;

My living quarters are comfortable enough,

And I can read, write, and research at my leisure,

Provided I don’t attempt to transmit any of it

To the outside world. 

Beyond the boundaries of this small compound,

I am a non-person; neither my name nor image

Has appeared in the pages of the Daily Ozmapolitan

For several years now, and it is whispered

(With the full knowledge and abetment of the current elite)

That I am, in fact, gravely ill if not dead.

I could, I suppose, rage against my confinement,

Shout my grievances and pronouncements against autocracy

To the heavens, but my cottage and the outbuildings

Lie in a thickly forested place, and it has not escaped my notice

That all of these structures are built entirely from wood.

No matter, then; I am the victim, first and last,

Of my own foolishness, my own inability

To resist the nectar of power, the ambrosia of command.

I, of all people, believing the road could run both ways!

West Center Street was, not so long ago,
A kaleidoscopic flood come three o’clock:
Children in waves of blues, greens, and golds
Set free from Margiotti Elementary,
The more subdued hues of the men
Finishing first shift, at the Montmorenci Mills
All filling the sidewalk
Like some great jigsaw puzzle in continual motion.
Now, the color seems to have left us for greener pastures,
Only the faded, unevenly washed yellow buses
Which take the children
To the central school over in St. Mary’s remain,
Solemn faces forlornly pressed to the windows
As they pass the ungainly and obsolete building
Now dark and silent, squat and hunched-over,
And further on the mill, gates padlocked,R
rusted pieces of chain-link pointing accusatorily downward,
As if the fault for its closing
Lies with us and us alone.

Ah, but it was different, near enough in time
That the memories remain sharp, clear, biting
And they come back in curious bits and pieces,
Like how the Market Basket stayed open twenty-four hours
So the third-shifters could shop for groceries
Without having to short-change themselves on sleep,
The lights in Carter’s Depatment Store,
Bright as Heaven itself to six-year old eyes
Fixed wonderingly on an electric football game
Or a toy bridge of the Enterprise, complete with a transporter
Which made Spock disappear As Seen on TV,
Or how, when we went to the Friday fish-fry at the Kinzua House,
We would stop at every table,
Fathers exchanging greetings, finishing those jokes
Which the noise along the line had left incomplete.

You left, just like everyone else, but not for good, of course;
It was just a temp job to make some money
Until you’d saved up enough to help out your mom.
Once you got settled, you’d come back home
To visit—by Christmas, at the very latest.
We waited outside of the old Rexall for the Trailways bus
That would take you to Erie,
And after the shortest half-hour I’d ever known
We kissed at the curb and embrace
Until the driver intimated with his horn
That we either needed to say goodbye or get a room.
Still, I knew you’d be back, as, after all
There are bonds that time and distance cannot break.


That is all over now, and those dreams
Our parents clung to like rosaries,
Where our lives were better than what they had known
Have moved south to Charlotte, or Houston, or Birmingham;
The Market Basket closed, boarded and de-windowed;
Hell, you can’t buy a single gallon of milk
Between here and Ridgway,
And the Kinzua House long gone as well,
Save for the tattoo place that occupies the space
Where the bar once was,  
And once in a while, though less so every year,
You’ll catch one of the old-timers, frozen in time,
Staring at the smokestacks of the old mill
Ancient obelisks like those
Looming over the graves of the town’s founders
Tucked away in the old section of the cemetery
Up on Bootjack Hill,
The paths chock-full with weeds and briars,
The grass unmown for some three summers now.

*When I got your card, it was postmarked from Denver;
The temp gig hadn’t lasted as long as it was supposed to,
And it’s not like Erie is a boom town, after all.
Still, you were there long enough to meet someone,
Someone, you noted who was looking ahead,
Not over his shoulder all the **** time;
Besides, you noted in your one
And ultimately failed attempt at humor
You remembered how our Geography teacher had once said
That all the land east of the Missisippi,
Even here in the foothills of the Endless Mountains,
Were simply mounds of dirt, old and dead,
While the Rockies were young, vibrant, still shifting and growing.
The card was one of those that come blank on the inside
So you can compose your own witty epithet,
As there are some sentiments so dreadful in their foolishness
That even Hallmark won’t touch them.

Live in the moment*, we exhort ourselves as well as others,
But such a mandate is a fool’s errand, nothing more,
For all which we endeavor, all we savor and regret,
Are transitory things, snatches of synapse,
Fireflies gone a-gleaming before we can fasten the cap,
All Chinese-checkerboarded with air holes, onto the jar.
So forgive me, then, for not extolling the virtues
Of your laugh, your smile, a certain set of jaw or wrinkle of nose,
For those are fleeting morsels of time,
Mere snapshots, flat and obsolete at the click of the shutter,
Like the crimson-iris inducing Instamatic images of long ago.
Rather let me, then, dwell
Upon the aftermath of these glimmers in time, in your eyes
Those crevices of memory and apprehension
Where the momentary acquires its shading and gradation,
Its context and concreteness, its niche in ones cosmology
Of those things which flutter the surface
Of somnambulant ponds of sleep,
Roiling the stuff of our dreams for better or for worse.

We’d dreaded there’d be nothing left to say,
Moving from fondest hopes and deepest fears
Shared in courting’s dawn to the workaday,
Wednesday’s meatloaf and checkbooks in arrears,
That hearts would be silenced, tongues would be stilled
By diapers and deadlines, things which preclude
Persistence of ardor, devotion chilled,
Love’s early zeal a brief interlude.
We laugh at such now; how could we have known,
(No more than children ourselves, after all)
That devotion has a grace all its own
Which lifts us after pitfall and pratfall
(The flat tire, smudge of soot on the face)
To pilot us above the commonplace.

There was plenty cats who could ****** a quarter offa backboard,
They used to say up at Happy Warrior,
But the Goat was the only one
Who could float so long that he could leave change,
And then they’d slap each other on the back,
Laughin' until they couldn’t breathe.
Some folks still tell the story, old timers—hell, old men now,
But they don’t laugh much no more, because they all know the story;
Ain’t one of those things where people ask Whatever became of...
Like a Boobie Tucker or Funny Kitt, because Earl was a myth, see,
A neighborhood Icarus, but one with moments of doubt
The pusher, all loud clothes and soft smooth voices,
Played Earl and played him to his weak hand.
College coach ain’t gonna push for no brother
Who ain’t got the grades,
No matter how much lift he got.  
Then what, man?
You gonna hang outside the park, leanin’ on the fence,
Some old man whose name used to get you respect?
****, man, you think you can fly?
Man, I got somethin’ make you fly.
The pusher baited and Earl hit the hook hard;
Wasn’t long before he was noddin’ on corners
Like some old **** wino,
Pretty soon a stint Upstate after he botched robbin’ some bar,
Then a long slow slide until he died.
The Hawk, Alcindor, The Pearl—they knew he was the man,
Best ever according to Lew, and man how he flew,
But the streets have their own peculiar physics
And the rim ain’t nothing but ten feet off the ground.

It was not, by any means, a loss of faith;
Indeed, her devotion was a boundless, unfettered thing
Beyond proscription, beyond rote chant and catechism,
And what she found as a novitiate
Were shuttered gates and gossipy confessionals,
Standoffish priests, pig-eyed and pinch-lipped
Sisters who thought life’s commerce
No more than mechanical prayer and spotless linens,
The whole enterprise
Smacking of the exclusion of Heaven’s bounty.
So she demurred when the time came to take her orders,
And she returned to the world of pavements and lesser pieties,
Free to seek God on park swings and barstools,
In pleasures of the pastoral and the profane,
Though her faith is no Dionysian walkabout,
As she is passionate to the cusp of maniacal
When it comes to the Book of James’ admonition upon works;
She is often found among the sisters she once tiptoed alongside
At food pantries and clothing drives
(She is scrupulous about ministering to only secular needs,
As the Bishop is not happily disposed towards those
Who choose not to take the veil,
And the specter of excommunication is a prospect
Too awful to contemplate)
Afterwards clambering onto some vaguely roadworthy MTA bus
Back to her studio apartment in Green Island,
Where she often walks down to the Erie Canal lock nearby,
Praying for those who have travelled  near and upon the water,
Convenience store clerks and ragged Irishmen fleeing famine,
Feral kittens and insufficiently mourned mules.

If anyone should ask who I was after I have left this place,
You’ll likely come up with the most self-effacing lie
Convenient to you at that particular moment,
For I was perceived to be an accessory to your greatest mortification,
As such, I could never be more than just a what-may-have-been,
A reminder of a lifetime unfulfilled, unrealized.
Your brother was simply a name to me,
A dimly remembered face
Among any number of names and faces;
But you, oh, you were every word I’d ever sung or spoken,
And I knew every subtle rise and dip in the bridge of your nose,
The shoreline of your eyes, every shade of shadow
The sun cast upon your face.
I could not be what your brother imagined or prayed I was,
What, in fact, you are to me, thus ensuring
I would always be, in some sense, in some sunken corner of your mind,
A broken promise to that broken boy,
A sum destined forever to be in arrears.

Death is most charitable when it is final,
Once the defeated remains of the dearly departed
Have been neatly packaged, the papers filed,
The period placed on the end of the sentence,
For too often it rolls incessantly down the years,
Its effects no less corrosive, its whys and wherefores as insubstantial
As the air that sad boy kicked at in those final moments.
No service for us, then, no “closure”, whatever that may mean,
Only a continual repetition of the door flung open, the strangled cry,
The blackened, bloated face staring at the pair of us, forever separate,
In mute and expressionless indictment.

The pin wobbled in a manner which would tantalize another man,
But he knew, surely as he knew his own name,
Knew in the very maw of his soul,
That it would remain implacably upright.
He was right, of course, the seven-pin standing ***** as a toy soldier
In complete defiance of tenets of physics and divine mercy.
He’d been down this road before,
More times than he’d care to remember:
Some occasions of his own making, short-arming the last ball,
Having it hit the head pin too flush,
Or going Brooklyn and leaving the ten unscathed,
But equally often seemingly the victim of random fate or its like,
Where he’d the pocket just so,
With all the action you’d need or could muster,
Yet somehow the pins would bounce off the wall in patterns
Inexplicable via Newton's laws, the work of gremlins or voodoo,
Perhaps the vexatious ghost of some manual pin-setter of long ago.
He’d put together eleven straight strikes
On every lane in the house a half-dozen times,
Some nights when the boards were as giving
As a rich and doting grandmother,
Other times in sport conditions
Where no one else even sniffed two hundred
(On one such evening, he’d scored a perfect game
On the ancient shuffle-alley game tucked into a corner of the bar, Celebrating, in a manner of speaking,
By taking chunky, sad-faced Penny Marie
From the payroll office at the mill
Up against a wall in the dimly-lit alley behind the building.)

After enduring the usual consolation and confabulation,
He left the alley, walking up the hill to the old two-story on Fifth St.
Which he shared with his mother and other memories,
Though the house bore little trace of his existence, present or otherwise
(His mother had, just once, put a few of his trophies and plaques
Out on display on the mantelpiece in the parlor;
He’d insisted that she take them down forthwith.
Buncha ******* plastic and stamped tin, he’d snapped,
Don’t mean a ******* thing to no ******* body.)
He’d nodded to her on his way through to his room
(She still, out of force of habit, still waited up for him,
Part simple inertia, part hopeful belief
In the talismanic nature of the maternal)
Grunting Y’know, one of those nights in reply to her inquiry
As to how well or otherwise the evening went.
He’d undergone the usual bedtime ministrations
(An indifferent ****, the near-frenzied tooth brushing
Which failed to remove the effluvium which accompanied him home
Courtesy of bad bar pizza and Rolling Rock)
Before another evening of fitful dreams
Consisting of hazy yet glorious episodes
Which never seemed to reach fruition before the advent
Of an unwelcome and vaguely malevolent sunrise.

You’ll find them in all such establishments,
(Be they graceful small-town former Victorian homes,
Or cinderblock edifices mindful of some campus multi-faith center)
Sitting in the basement, cheek-to-jowl
With moldering burial records and banking statements,
Yellowed newspaper clippings, faded prayer cards
Small squared-off boxes hastily tabbed together,
Ostensibly temporary containers which have acquired
An unintended and wholly unwelcome permanence.
The whys and wherefores of their subterranean placement
A mixed bag of foible and outright foolishness:
Unresolvable squabbles concerning possession and burial,
Families that skipped out on the bill, leaving mom behind,
Cases of outright not giving a good-*******.
And so they remain, in lieu of repatriation and redemption,
To sit for something akin to perpetuity in some cases
(Members of the profession resolute in their respect
For the dignity of life,
Though their sincerity enjoys less unanimity)
While others wait for mass burial
Once legal niceties have been satisfied,
While still others, in care of firms not so scrupulous
About crossing their t’s and dotting their i’s,
Are flung, albeit somewhat surreptitiously, out the back door,
The remains to take flight if the grass is dry and the wind is brisk,
Otherwise to be left to the vagaries
Of curious birds and creped soles.

It was back in…hell, must have been seventy-six?

Anyway, I was livin’ up around Bolton Landing

And doing some odd jobs (some very odd, indeed,

But that’s another story for another time)

At the Sagamore—big fancy hotel on Lake George—

When I started hearing people runnin’ their pie-holes

About this crazy-*** pigeon.  

Folks were saying the **** bird

Had somehow got ahold of the idea

That it was a ******* hawk or falcon,

Swooping down like it was after rabbits or field mice

Instead of bits of bread, and some of the old-timers

(Most likely addled by the years, or maybe having lived alone

For just a little too **** long)

Swore on the gravesof their dear sainted mothers

That they had seen it do full-out barrel rolls.



Well, little towns are all about big talk,

So naturally I wasn’t about to put much stock

In this particular rural legend—but one day

I’m walking around downtown,

And I see this chunky blue-gray blur tear-assing

Down around my pantleg for a bit before it leveled off

And started to climb, throwing in a couple of three-quarter turns

Just for ***** and giggles.



I saw that **** thing do its stunt flying

Several times after that:  loop-de-loops, death spirals

And a few more power dives, just to scare the women and children.

That old fool bird was pretty scuffed up and worse for wear

From its acrobatics—after all, it was just a pigeon

And it could daredevil from sunup to sundown,

But that didn’t mean it was likely to turn into no Blue Angel



The third, or maybe the fourth, time

I happened to catch the bird’s act

I caught a glimpse of its head, and I swear to you,

On all I hold true and holy, the bird was…grimacing,

Like it was just plain sick and tired of all the limitations

That nature had foisted off on fat, ungainly creatures like itself.  

Some days I would walk past the old McEachern place,

And I’d see that bird perched on an old, mostly-collapsed barn

Just staring at the cloud cover hiding Mount Marcy

(Where eagles lived in the crags,

Breathing the rarified air that pigeons,

Skimming the rooflines of strip malls, would never know.)



After a few months, folks stopped seeing the bird

And his wild-*** air show.  

Maybe it had been a bit slow

On the uptake while pulling out of a dive,

Or perhaps it finally came around to the notion

That a pigeon was, after all, just a pigeon, no more and no less.

Hell, maybe it set off for the High Peaks after all.

I’ve read that the ancients would read the entrails of birds

In order to tell the future, and maybe they could,

But in my book, ignoring the sweep and swoop of flight

And the mysteries of why-they-do-what

So you can ponder and mull over

The collection of bugs and gravel in its guts

Says about all I need to know about the notion of wisdom.

I have garnered such wealth as I have
Through, if I may be so bold as to say so,
A preternatural ability to observe and catalogue
The foibles and follies of my fellow man
(This hard-won sagacity not the product
Of what I have learned as much as
The sum of what others do not know of themselves)
Yet, even though I believed
I had plumbed the very depths of absurd behaviors,
The prospect of kings--no, more than that,
Kings among kings-- bearing gifts
And complete fealty to some rank infant
Rudely swaddled and propped upon damp straw
Has brought even myself to bafflement.
Understand, the charms of children
(And the commensurate commercial usefulness)
Are not unknown to me,
But they are mercurial, undependable beings,
As ephemeral as the light of stars
Which allegedly acted as a guide to that trio of sovereigns
As their retinues crossed sand and savanna
(I sometimes chuckle to myself at the notion
That perhaps unwarranted clouds
Could have obscured the object in question,
And that the triumvirate could yet be
Wandering, searching, ruminating in vain)
Such intangibles are nonsense, of course;
Mere fol-de-rol entertained by those
Who would disdain the heft of solid coin,
The grit of good sand and dirt
Providing the assurance of good footing
As one saunters across the landscape
Upon such a night as this,black and unilluminated
As the aftermath of death itself.

It was the season when a young man’s fancy
Turns to hunkering down as the land around him locks,
When the envoys of the abyss
Stalk elderly relatives and spindly late-born calves.
He’d happened upon her
At Aubuchon’s Hardware over in Gouverneur,
Picking up bits and bobs to tie up those projects
(The endless caulking, the pitched battles with plaster and lath)
Which had trickled over the spillway of spring and summer
When she more or less materialized,
Like the sudden bloom of some ill-timed crocus
Popping up through fallen leaves.
She’d quizzed him on the merits of levels, cup hooks, and spackles
(The story being she’d leased a gerrymandered third-floor studio
Over the Rent-A-Center on Clinton Street)
They’d chatted in the middle of an aisle for a half-hour or so
When she tittered You know, I could really use a beer about now,
Which became several, then burgers, then his house and bed
Where she settled in for the duration
(She’d had her suitcases in her trunk, and he came to surmise
That an apartment hadn’t been in her plans at all.)
He’d learned about her what little she chose to share:
A nut allergy, a borderline prodigal capacity for whiskey,
Certain boudoir practices and positions,
But her whos, whats and wherefores an admixture
Of carefully chosen quarter-truths and outright fictions;
He’d noticed, inadvertently,
That she had a half-dozen driver’s licenses in her purse,
And she’d been furiously tight-lipped
About where’d she been and come from,
Save one drunken mention of how she’d lived down near Ithaca
Just long enough to stand on the very precipice
Of one of the town’s plethora of gorges
Before deciding not to go headlong over the edge,
‘S no real point, she demurred,
In anything that puts a period on sumpin’.

There was no question of some Snow White happily-ever-after;
She melted away as abruptly as she’d arrived,
Leaving on an implausibly warm late-February day,
A deceit of sunshine and southerly breezes
Which belied the month-plus of hard slog ahead.
He’d cherished no illusions
Of going after her, of tracking her down:
There was small chance she’d given him her real name,
Assuming she knew it at this point,
And she’d changed her cell number in a matter of hours.
He’d done his best to simply chalk it up as a lesson learned
Or a hell of a hell of a story to share with the boys at Nina’s Hotel,
But she had become (or, rather, the notion of
What she might have become,
As all faithless acts require acquiescence to the existence of faith)
A giant hogweed in his very sinews, invasive and implacable,
All but impervious to destruction and subsequent reclamation,
And the throes of her remained as confabulations
In his mind and heart and groin
All through what turned out to be
The longest of long North Country winters,
With flurry and sleet enjoying dominion over new blooms
Until well into the middle of May.

She noted, grimly cognizant of though unamused by the irony,
That her likeness, or something akin to that,
Appeared on the poster—a gray-clad strong and vibrant woman
Reaching, in concert with her comrades
(One woman in a white coat, a man in overalls and requisite cap,
Still another androgynous figure in a futuristic ensemble
Resembling some cross of a Western science fiction movie
And some cheap Petrograd-made tin foil)
Toward a hammer-and-sickle adorned moon
Soon to be conquered by a similarly festooned rocket ship.
She is no scientific apparatchik, no technically gifted party functionary;
It is her job to feed the canine occupant of this mission to the cosmos
(Two mutts from the Moscow streets, she confides to Ilysa,
One of the few co-workers who can be trusted with such a statement.)
The dog, she notes without any trace of rancor, eats quite well,
Better than she does in truth,
But it is a series of last meals for the condemned,
For there is no secret as to the dog’s eventual fate
(Poor cur, he has no idea he is doomed,
One of the scientists clucks sadly,
Though she simply shrugs in reply,
Knowing a test or a trap when she sees it,
Though she thinks to herself He is far from alone)
And, after she has cleaned up the remnants of the dog’s dinner,
She heads back to her one-room flat on the Yaseneavaya Boulevard,
Noting ruefully, as she ascends the crumbling, unsteady steps
Leading to her blocky, faceless building,
That the omnipresent klieg lighting of the street lamps
Serves to obscure any trace of the heavens in the night sky.

They sit in the humblest of frames,
Faux wood-grained plastic grotesqueries
Purchased long ago from some doomed Grants or Bradlees,
Though one or two enjoy something nicer,
Left behind by some long-timer taking a buyout
Or a sympathetic youngster denied tenure
(She has, for the better part of three decades,
Cleaned up the detritus of middle-school children,
A bit stooped from the work,
Not to mention the burden
Of any number of she’s just  or she’s only
Tossed like so much bric-a-brac in her direction.)
The approximations of old masters equally eclectic in origin:
One or two gallery-quality reproductions
Blithely abandoned by some haughty faculty matron
Mentoring children through noblesse oblige,
The odd promotional piece from a scholastic publisher,
Mostly things she has cut from magazines or discarded texts.
She studiously avoids pieces tending to the dark or muted,
No Stuart portraiture or pensive Vermeers;
She has a strong predilection for bold, boisterous Gaugins,
Mad cubist Picassos, lush Cezanne still-lifes,
Even the odd blocky *******.
If you pressed her to explain her fetish
For the brightest of the great masters,
She would likely be at a loss to explain,
Having no academic bent for such things
(Though she has been known to curse the shortcomings
Of lithographers and pressmen under her breath)
And, as she freely admits, I’m not much good with words.
There would be the uncharitable suggestion
That their purpose is to mask cracks and pockmarks in her walls
(She has, to be sure, lived in a long series of such places)
But she has never, consciously or otherwise,
Used them for such pedestrian and utilitarian purposes;
They are, to her anyway, beautiful, and that is all they need be.

There is no question of her cycling up the hill;
She has no upscale concoction
Of carbon-fiber frame and painstakingly engineered gear-ratios.
Her bike is a single-speed Schwinn
Of as uncertain vintage
As the woman herself,
And she walks it,
An occasional spoke missing,
The paint chipped here and there,
Up where she once climbed
In a ’54 Chrysler convertible
Next to the man
She later visited at the TB sanitorium
Which once sat at the top of the street,
Two sons giggling and bickering
In the back seat
(The boys long since gone,
Having fled the snow and the downsizing
For other climes)
But now she peddles her bike
Around Massey and State Streets for a bit
Before she coasts back downhill,
And sometimes drivers glare
At her (she is, to be fair
Something of an impediment to traffic)
And carfuls of kids or soldiers in convoys
Headed up to Fort Drum
Will heckle her--Hey, lady!
The Tour De France was last month!
She no longer has any interest in
The stares or commentary;
She is focused on the bottom of the hill.

It’s a ******* good thing there’s no bouncers in church,
(Though your dad’s just the type who would bring in some thugs)
And the lack of an invite left me in the lurch;
All I wanted was one goodbye kiss and some hugs.
I suppose I should have laid off the Prairie Fire,
(Two parts Wild Turkey, and three parts Tabasco)
As the ***** and my broken heart served to conspire
To make the affair something of a fiasco.
It may have been short-sighted to **** in the punch,
Waving my Johnson around like King Arthur’s sword,
And I regret if it ruined the buffet lunch;
I’ve never been the type who liked to be ignored.
Your mouth opened to scream, but didn’t make a sound
(I’ll take that as a sign that you might come around.)

He had been this month’s bright, shining hope,
Producing bits of promising prose poking out of obscure journals
And higher-brow magazines here and there
Like shoots of tiny grasses between cracks in the pavement.
Then there was a novel--not good, really,
But flecked with sufficient promise
To leave the arbiters of culture wanting more,
But he departed the publication party
With a foot heavy on the pedal and the tires light on tread,
Thus precluding a sequel.

And so he remains, beyond the slow decay of time
Or the clucking and tut-tutting of critics
Who, bored, cranky, and ultimately undone by their own limitations,
Cannot help but add the dross of a touch of bronze
To all their former golden children.
Yet as his peers grow older, their lives in various states of disarray,
Their legacies vacillating between disrepute and utter disinterest,
He remains, on the dust jackets of first editions
Or inside the covers of the quaintly priced paperbacks
With their quasi-psychedelic artwork,
Completely untouched by the passing days and years,
His smile bright, hair dark and curly,
His potential limitless and unsullied.

One thought this is how London looked after The Blitz
Although there was no one's finest hour to be cited
Commemorating how these torched shells of buildings came to be,
Standing not in defiance as much as the indifference of gravity
To finishing a job better not left incomplete,
Given they were fit for nothing but rats and pigeons
(And they probably not without their misgivings)
But one night we were driving over to Jersey
To obtain grain alcohol or some other contraband,
I'd observed the odd single-bulb shining out of
What purported to be a windowless frame,
Misbegotten wished-upon stars
Failing to deliver upon the most prosaic of aspirations,
And that evening I'd drank with a taciturn fury,
My companions shaking their heads,
Saying For chrissakes, you're less ******* fun than usual.
Go the hell home, or haunt a ******' graveyard,
And I did not travel upon that highway again
Until I left The Island for good, grabbing a ride
From a friend who was a fellow native
Of the cold, cow country Upstate
And as we approached the Throgs Neck Bridge,
I turned away from the window, telling my buddy
I'm gonna grab some shut-eye; you can wake me
Once we hit the Palisades.

We say
it is wasted
upon the young, to which
Youth retorts, Grampy, I do not
concur.

There were a surfeit of items
Sufficient to raise eyebrows or cause comment
Among the few staid members of the Mulligan clan:
The appearance of siblings or cousins assumed (or at least hoped)
To have preceded Thomas to the choir invisible
Two or three women genuinely surprised
To discover the existence of one another,
One young man with an extremely disconcerting resemblance
To his “Uncle Tommy”,
But the entire affair carried on with something akin
To the requisite solemnity
Until such point that a couple bottles appeared
(The consensus being that the good Mulligan
Had somehow found a way to secret them in)
The end result being the proceedings
Subsequently devolved into an Irish cop wake-esque teleplay,
And in the midst of this fol-de-rol, Tippy Phelan,
Who had framed walls for generic bank buildings
And grunted and swore while cobbling together
Unnecessary cupolas and wholly superfluous cornices
On the McMansions of the small town well-enough-to-do
With Tommy (as well as, on Friday lunch-times
During the slow season, sharing a thermos
Containing a mixture which drew narrow-eyed stares
From lenient if still unhappy foremen)
Stood the final toast for the good Mulligan,
Intoning There’s a land of the quick and the land of the lost,
The trick being to build a sturdy span between them
So it’s only proper that Tommy was a ****** fine carpenter.

It was only gonna be a little three-hour jump
‘Till the barometer bottomed out and the Minnow went bump
But you make chocolate milk when life gives you turds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

When that sightseeing gig hit a bit of a snag
It stopped that tight trio from bein' everyone's bag
Because, Daddy, those cats are just too cool for words
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

TH III drips with sophistication,
But it don’t stop the man from syncopatin'
They trumpet like elephants ‘n twitter like birds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

It’s Thurston on the keyboards settin’ the pace
Little Buddy on drums, the Captain on bass
Wowin’ folks drinking coconut shaken-and-stirreds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

They blow sixteenths and eights and do it in style
Cooler than cats on any charted isle
Keep your Goodman Quintets and your Thundering Herds
Ain’t nothin’ like Thurston Howell and The Thirds.

The exasperation, even given the vagaries
Of atmospheric phenomena and ill-placed cell towers
Was fully apparent as you snipped
The problem must be on your end,
(Perhaps something else there as well
Tangible but fading in and out with the signal)
And most likely you were right,
The lay of the land around here
Fraught with no small portion of glacial hijinks:
Moraines cutting off abruptly
In half-finished bell curves, high-ridged valleys
Which transform squalls and thunderstorms
Into mad, howling meteorological harpies
(But listen, I said, to how they play catch
With the sound of fireworks or church bells
Until they seem to come from nowhere
Yet everywhere at once,
But I suspect that part of the call
Was bamboozled by an inconvenient hillside).

...can follow an airplane across the sky for hours
(I’d parked the car at the top
Of Bootjack Hill, your voice returning
As the ancient, acid-washed stones
Of the old cemetery came into view)
And you’ve never seen such crisp, sharp light
In all your days, and before I could respond
You said softly, almost conspiratorially
Now don’t you start with your silliness
About sorbet skies at dusk,
As if sunsets or poetry ever put groceries in the cupboards,
And I would have sworn,
Even you spoke in little more than a murmur,
That you had never left at all,
But were no more than a few feet away.

Such raiments would be the province
Of those gated and corniced places
Up on the hillside, and even that milieu
Living on residue and recollection,
The glories of the past
Fading like so many past-peak October leaves,
Beautiful in the sense of such colors
They heretofore possessed,
Though in any case, the whys and wherefores
And relative merits of thens and nows
Secondary to more prosaic matters:
The price per gallon at the Gulf station down on Route 17,
Seasonal temps at Bear Mountain
Trying line up some other gig or side-hustle
Once the land locks and the leaf-peepers and hikers go home,
Those hoping corroded propane tanks and curled shingles
Can make it just one more winter,
And if the worried and wondering
Enjoyed the luxury of philosophic musing,
They might ponder upon what those earlier residents
Who had lived at the apex of Manhattan society
(And possibly even those earlier residents,
Jumbles of Patroon and Lenape blood
Who crouched forlornly in the Palisades
As that skyline came into being)
Would think of what became of this place,
Yet as they look up there are no ghosts of the ancients,
But merely the impassive, lazily circling turkey vultures,
Implacable, enduring, constant.

The basement sported the requisite folding metal chairs,
Each of indeterminate age and reliability,
One wall featuring a poster of a standard-issue Jesus,
Implacably serene, ministering to a flock
Of equally generic and cherubic children.
An ancient coffee table, suitably gouged and graffitied,
Sat off to one side,
Encumbered with ashtrays,
Styrofoam cups of varying degrees of emptiness,
And the remains of a bundt cake
(Store-bought, the evening’s dessert designee
Not up to the challenge of having her baking skills
Being yet one more thing held up to the light for judgment.)
The tales were standard issue bottle-done-me-wrong-song fare:
Jobs lost, marriages torn asunder, children estranged,
Plaintive tunes sung by the usual suspects
(The weak-chinned with haunted faces, the closeted gays,
The intense silent types still in the full bloom of denial.)
There was, this particular evening, an extra folding chair
Sitting unused off to the right,
Normally occupied by a compact, muscular sort
Who, when not furiously scribbling notations
In an ancient stenographer’s notebook,
(This habit earned several looks-that-would ****
From some of the long-term habitués of these meetings,
Who felt he was making some speakers a bit reticent,
Considerably reducing the sessions’ entertainment value)
Observed the proceedings intensely with ****** expressions
Alternating between schoolboy grins and bailiff-stern frowns.

Some weeks prior to leaving the group, his demeanor changed;
The notebook left at home, the sine waves of emotional extremes
Exchanged for an easygoing, almost beatific smile,
He’d sit with hands behind head, leaning backward in his chair
(The rubber tips of the chair legs making a soft tap, tap, tap
As they lifted and settled back onto the floor),
Letting the weekly affairs roll on
As if they didn’t concern him in the least.
His sponsor had been, understandably, somewhat taken aback
By this sudden sea-change in attitude,
And was further nonplussed by the response
To the polite inquiry as to this change in heart.
I’ve discovered to the secret, the sponsor was informed,
All of it, every last **** thing that’s said every **** week
All due to sadness--and I know that all I need to do
Is not to cause it for anyone else, and not feel it myself.
I’ll never need to drink again, he said with a smile
That would not have been out of place among the angels,
And he turned and walked away,
Never to attend a meeting again.

He may have been right
(For whom among us could say for sure he was wrong?)
But, as it turned out,
Sadness was not the type of adversary
Which was of a mind to come out and fight like a man;
It lurked in dark corners, and was apt to come at you
From all directions and at all hours,
Nor was it averse to enlisting loved ones and total strangers
In the furthering of its cause.  
He’d parried and ****** at these shadowy antagonists
(Though his exertions and exhortations were,
Often as not, directed at nothing more than thin air)
With increasing frustration
And diminishing certainty as to his beliefs,
And at some point he supposed that his effective weaponry
Was reduced to a sturdy chair, strong rope, and solid roof beam
(The landlady found him just a bit too late,
His toes rhythmically drumming against the apartment door.)

The long evening of sighs and serenity came to a close,
Goodbyes and small talk wrapping up in short order,
And the participants walked up the stairs from the basement
(One or two members nodding, perhaps in reverence,
Possibly in whimsy to the picture of the Son on their way out)
And a few of them made mention
As to how much darker the evenings seemed
Now that fall was slipping away toward winter,
And how nice it would be if the parking lot was better lit.

Once (not that long ago, perhaps, though we likely know better)
The summers were languid, liquid things without end
Each day fully equipped with a high sky,
The blue so all-encompassing, so all consuming,
That lazy fly ***** seemed to disappear
As if God had scooped them up like so many routine grounders.
We played, in a field long since abandoned
To crownvetch and scrub grass,
Twenty one--five points for those *****
The celestial powers had bobbled
And we were able to catch on the fly,
Three points if we took it on the hop,
One if we safely trapped it before it rolled stone dead,
And so our Julys and Augusts fluttered by,
Every bit lazy and aimless as butterflies or knuckleballs,
With the exception of the de riguer tribunals
In which the assembled debated and determined
Where bounce ended and roll began,
Where shoestring catch was reduced to single-point trap.

It all came to an end, of course;
At some point, we crossed a line
(Undelineated but firmly established nonetheless)
Where it was no longer advisable to attempt this at home,
Mere joy no longer an acceptable substitute for proficiency.
Find something else to do, kid, we were told,
And the bats went to the back of the closet,
The gloves and ***** consigned to a spot
(Where we would surely remember to find them)
Behind some canned tuna and Christmas lights,
The fastball blurring by us now,
The field a warren of subdevelopments and cul-de-sacs.

And so you’d forgotten,
Or perhaps just suppressed, the whole notion;
There were, after all, a gaggle of coupon books
With return addresses from an ever-changing confusion of banks,
Sales on pasta and milk, other fees and foundations
Politely requesting ones attention,
So you couldn’t be sure
That it was really the crack of an old thick-handled Adirondack,
Or the comforting thwick of the ball landing squarely
In the pocket of a Wilson A-2000,
Yet when you wandered to the window and peered out,
There they were, looking straight up at you,
Waving their hands like childlike Prosperos
Gesturing to reveal some fairytale glen.  
Come on back, they are saying, and you go down,
Powerless to resist, even if you had wanted to,
Returned instantly, seamlessly to a time and place
Where a shout of I got it! I got it!
Was all the prerequisite or vitae that was required,
And you are unable to bring even mock-edginess to your voice
When you insist I got that cleanly on the hop.  That’s three points.

He will allow, if you press him on the point,
That it can be a hard go sometimes;
Holsteins have no concept of weekends, he will say,
Or Christmas, for that matter,
But all that being said
With a smile practically gushing contentment.
He has, for thirty-plus years now,
Worked some four hundred head, dairy and beef
In this cold, flat valley where low-pressure systems come to die,
Bringing the detritus of low clouds and snow flurries in tow,
Sometimes even into the middle of May.  
He is not unaware the outlook for his homestead is hazy, at best;
He has consciously blocked out how much he is into the bank
For feed, the re-built corn silos, the new Case tractor,
And both of his sons have long since fled south,
Preferring the comfort of powerpoint presentations and cubicles
To a cold, dark milking house in the middle of January,
But he has seen the future come and go,
Dwelling in the misbegotten debris of the recent past:
Huge, slightly Fifties-space-movie-flying-saucer satellite dishes
Pointing forlornly directly at the horizon
Outside shuttered and foreclosed upon houses
Which litter any number of the back roads,
The yellowing signs promoting cheap internet access
Taped to windows in small, half-empty strip malls in Gouvernuer,
All cause enough for him to opine at virtually every opportunity
I have seen the future, and I can confirm
That it clearly ain’t what it used to be.

He could have, if he had of a mind to do so, gone in another direction;
Unlike most of the farm kids,
Who were packaged as a unit into the General Ed track,
He’d tested himself into the College Prep classes,
Where several of his teachers made it a point to tell him
Virgil, you need to understand that you’re a bright kid.  
You can do other things, go other places,
And one or two of his instructors were downright offended
That he chose to take over the farm immediately upon graduation,
But he knew at an early age—no, had always known
That he would remain in this place, on this patch of land,
Even though he could not even begin to explain
The whys and wherefores of his decision,
Language being the ungainly
And wholly inadequate instrument that it is
(This is why, he would say every Sunday morning
At breakfast with Gerald Glass and Earl Tiefenauer,
The both of them rolling their eyes in tandem,
Knowing exactly what came next,
The Akwesasnes went hundreds of years without a written language;
They were smart enough to know that all words do
Is just get in the **** way)
But he knew that what was in the gentle, serene chugging,
The rhythmic pop of the ancient machinery
At the  Karsten place over on the Heuvelton Road
Flinging another squared-off hay bale into his jerry-built wagon,
Or in the blue sky which stretched, impossibly cloudless and glorious,
From the St. Lawrence up north down to Fort Drum
And onward for several forevers either way besides,
Was greater and weightier than anything in the cloth-bound red Bibles
Which sat in the pews at the Presbyterian church in Madrid
(Not his father’s church, but the blustering, cocksure Baptists,
Sure as death itself as to the absolute inambiguity of the Word
Were simply not his kind of people)
Which he had begun attending some half-dozen years ago,
Not because he was a particularly spiritual man by any means;
He had simply been unable to sufficiently convince himself
That all of this could happen strictly by accident.

They built the thing in the wrong **** direction, you know.
The “sun field” being home plate, and come late afternoons
Every pitch a potential life-and-death experience
For hitter and catcher alike
(One young Mets farmhand, in a fit of sheer exasperation,
Actually came to the plate in full catcher’s garb.)
Still, it was—well, at least once a upon a time—just a short hop
From Pittsfield to The Show, and any old timer
Will gladly talk your ear off about how Kenny Brett,
Barely a year out of high school, don’t you know,
Went straight from here to The Impossible Dream
(Though Kenny, so improbably young in all their memories
Is long since dead now, gone like the boom-times
Before GE shut down,
Leaving nothing behind but poisons in the Housantonic.)
That is all memory, though, the park’s fortunes
Fading hand-in-hand with the city’s,
Inhabited by low-level minor league clubs
Where one player a summer
Might get his Crash Davis moment in the sun,
And later indie-league teams with kids and hangers-on,
All barely good enough to dream.
Now there is only a summer league for low-ceiling college kids,
The old wooden grandstand,
Still standing out of some implausible stubbornness
(Last living World War One veteran,
Some local lifer will invariably say, cackling and spitting
Though their ranks thinned each year
By the siren song of trailer parks in Orlando and hip fractures)
Now dotted with a group of locals,
Quirky minor-league aficionados and a cluster of area scouts,
Who, on the odd occasion of something noteworthy on the field,
Will make a show of pulling out a stopwatch or radar gun
(Though they are aware they are here
With the lowest-common-denominator expectations,
Looking for organizational types,
Middle relievers and fifth outfielders to fill out rosters)
But most of the time, they simply huddle together
Talk quietly,speaking in inaudible tones
The words of some dead and inscrutable language.

The cast is ever changing, be it at Old Eli its ownself
Or various other institutions, most sans ivy,
Their distinguished here-and-gones
A touch short of presidents and laureates,
And certainly the songbook has changed
(Out with the Crosby and Waring,
In with the Cobain and the Stryper)
But certain verities, gnawing and implacable,
Remain unchanged, the inevitable realization
That, for all one's promise, all of our ilk
Have preceded us in our arrival, flush with pride and promise,
And made the odd ripple or two, perhaps,
Before shambling onward to other things
(Very rarely bigger and better, sadly enough)
And all those songs we sang and steins we hoisted
Have now been consigned to less fashionable quarters
In the anterooms of memory,
The melodies and laughter filtered, transformed, muted
The sound not unlike the slightly discomfiting bleatings
Of some distant barnyard animal.

He was, to be sure, very impressive indeed,
His bearing and carriage not of someone on his way
As much as one who had truly arrived:
Sleek, self-assured, possessing the calm of one
Who fully understands just how powerful he is,
One who has not embraced the company culture
As much as self-immersed in it,
To the point where it has so permeated his structure
That is hard to tell where he begins and it ends.
And yet, there is something unsettling there,
The odd non sequiturs, disturbing enough
In their utter and unconscious wrong-headedness,
But even more so
In the motorized, perfunctory method of their delivery,
As if it were obvious that it is we who are clearly incorrect.

Some three hours of drive time away,
Past any number of Holiday Inn Expresses,
Past numerous faded and shuttered Catskill resorts,
A handful of people carrying standard-issue banker’s boxes
Containing the detritus of twenty or thirty years of work
Exit the vestigial office the company maintains in its birthplace
(Only there as a nod to history, a sop to the locals and legislators.)
We hate to lose good people,
The HR person who drove up for the occasion
Intones solemnly to a handful of reporters
Who slouch nonchalantly in folding chairs
Scattered about a small, Seventies-wood-paneled conference room,
But there are certain market inefficiencies at work,
International incidents, kinks in the supply chain,
Other anomalies the forecasting tools
And business models couldn’t have foreseen.
And as he speaks, one of the newly superfluous
Wordlessly enters her car, pointing it homeward,
Across the sluggish, ice-clogged Susquehanna traversing  a bridge Commemorating a giant of cash registers and calculators.

Tanks roll
implacably;
Radio Free Europe
plays “On Broadway”, ode to pawnshops,
pimps, ******.

She is the living embodiment of the cliché,
The song where the male sub-lead
Returns from some second shift, some third drink
To find she has gone, leaving some scrap-paper note,
Hastily scribbled and wholly incomplete,
Some variation upon Don’t try and find me,
And so she is suitably unfound herself,
As she has given great thought to her froms,
But rather short shrift to her tos,
Finding herself north of the Thruway,
Looking for somewhere to spend the night
(The twin motors of adrenaline and anxiety running on fumes)
Happening upon, as if almost by some beneficent magic,
A Travelodge bordered by an expanse of cornfield
(Long since gone to seed, the stalks bowed and spent,
Waiting for the patently overdue cob harvester)
And after she is checked in and somewhat unpacked
(The bored, bemused woman who slumps about the front desk
Mercifully sparing with the small talk)
The skies, which had been late-October slate blur-gray,
Slightly malevolent but only implicit in their threats,
Open up in a cold and unwelcome drizzle,
And, whys and wherefores being things for a later date,
She runs outside and begins dancing in the parking lot,
Unseen and unremarked upon,
And even though the rain is cold, soaking, grim in portent
(The forecast dourly noting the possibility of wet snow,
Nattering that accumulation is possible at higher elevations.)
She is seemingly unaware and unconcerned
As to the upshot of this drenching,
Any whispers of the two or three other occupants of the motel,
Any judgments passed upon her mad danse pour un,
As she has passed beyond any notion of admonition.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

It is like shaking hands with a bag of oyster crackers;
Joints sprained, ligaments torn, fingers fractured
And splayed off in several different directions
Like a weathervane that has had a rather nasty shock, indeed,
The whorls of his fingertips, the uneven rise and fall of the knuckles
Serving as a travelogue of a lifetime spent
In towns not quite ready for the big time:
Olean, Oneonta, Visalia, Valdosta, a dozen more besides,
A million miles on buses
Of uncertain vintage and roadworthiness.
Each scar and swelling, each uneven path
Between base and fingertip has a tale of its own;
The ring finger on the left hand first broken
By a Big Bob Veale fastball that was supposed to be a curve,
Later snapped again by Steve Dalkowski,
Who, drinking quite a bit by then,
(When ol’ Steve had put away a few, he notes ruefully,
You didn’t want to hit him, catch him,
Or sit in the first few rows behind the plate)
Most likely never saw the sign
Indicating slider instead of high heat.
The index finger on his throwing hand?  
Well, that was from a foul tip in…Wellsville in ’59?  Walla Walla in ’62?
When you’ve bit up by the ball as many times as I have,
You tend to forget what you tore up when.
Ah, but no such problem with the right pinkie;
That was snapped one cold April night
Somewhere between Winnipeg and Duluth,
During a poker game when a backup infielder
Produced an unexpected and wholly inexplicable king
Seemingly from nowhere.

But those hands!  They were, in the lexicon of the scouts
(The same ones who labeled him
With the dreaded tag of “good field, no hit”)
Who trolled the sandlot parks
And high school fields of his childhood, “soft”;
Indeed, he could cradle a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball like an infant,
And, with the gentlest and most imperceptible of movements,
Turn the wildness of a nineteen-year-old phenom
Into an inning-ending third strike, and even now,
Two decades of bad lighting and jury-rigged equipment
Having turned the topography of his digits craggy and asymmetrical,
They seem as smooth and supple as they were at nineteen,
With all the strength and unsullied smoothness of youth,
As he grips and waggles an unseen bat
In the course of retelling
(In his one brief, glorious spring in camp with the big club)
How he doubled to the gap in right-center
Off none other than the great Whitey Ford himself.

It is an undertaking to be done with some trepidation,
As the arrival of June-like warmth and sunshine
Can lead us to an unwise giddiness,
A disregard for what we instinctually know
Concerning the introduction of basil and succulents
While the spectre of an unwelcome late-season freeze
Lurks some days westward in Calgary or Winnipeg,
But this is mostly the grunt work
One puts in for preparation for summer's bounty,
The shoveling and hoeing and grunting
Which one performs with pro forma grunting and *******
There is a certain reflexive restoration in this task
Which belies our outward irritation
And though we cast the odd sideways glance
Toward the shadows at the back of the lot
Where rabbits and chipmunks
And other less tangible potential enemies lie in wait
There is a warmth which permeates marrow and memory,
A thing which recalls a child running
Through torrents of October leaves
Or sitting wordlessly with a loved one on the porch
Or any number of tableaus from this thing
Of worry and wonder.

Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,
So Dusty Springfield asserted from her knees
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

The flow of passion deepens in fits and starts,
And does not walk the tidy path of our pleas.
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,

Till-death-do-we-part tortures spinsters and tarts
The rice a mirage, the wedding march a tease.
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

It ignores the primacy of graphs and charts,
Choosing its own time and moments to seize;
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,

Love at first sight upsets all our apple carts,
Yet we rush headlong to pick it from the trees.
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

One more torch song, then, to rocket up the charts.
One more tear-stained chanteuse to sing the reprise;
Love is just a thing to shred and rend our hearts,
(But, to grow a tree, you don’t start with tree parts.)

It’s a story of love at first sight, or at least by the third drink
You said You’re a true gentleman ‘fore you puked in the sink.
You promised you would love me true, that I was your white knight
But now you’re sleepin’ in a different castle every night.

You left me several subtle hints that you had finally gone
Like scatterin’ my boxers and my Trojans on the lawn.
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

The first night we spent together, hell, it was like a dream
And seein’ you in dawn’s first light didn’t make me scream.
You allowed that you could learn to like me quite a bit
Next mornin’ in my driveway there’s two U-Hauls with your ****.

Once I’d put my arms around you and whisper Mornin', hon.
Now if I woke up next to you, I’d just reach for my gun.
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

It took only a day or two for the cracks to appear
You made some unkind comments about my Ward Burton mirror.
And you told me to turn off Johnny Cash after a song or two
The Man in Black’s in Heaven, but there ain’t no room for you.

Well, you’ve heard tell of Mr. Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street
Compared to a shrew like you ol’ Freddy’s kinda sweet.
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.

Now I see you at the Dew Drop Inn with this evening’s Mr. Right
Just one more stupid ******* screwin’ up his life tonight
‘Cause I’m sure the hell you put me through will be on tap for him
I hope that he’ll get over you, and I hope your cat can swim.

I ain’t doin’ no name callin, won’t call you ***** or hag
I’m just carryin ol’ **** In Boots inside this burlap bag
It’s a quick trip from I love you to Goodbye, and that’s that.
It seems to me you’ve drowned your torch, so I’ll just drown your cat.